March 2010
26 posts
TrojanDroid
Last week I was at the CTIA, the wireless association, show. The amount of focus on Google’s Android platform at the show was mind boggling. Everywhere you looked there were people in droid costumes, droid banners, even a 20 foot high blow up droid at the entrance.
And the craziest part, Google was not the one pushing Droid at CTIA it was, Motorola, Samsung, HTC, Verizon, etc.
WTF are...
Don't be a Grin F>cker
Mark Suster wrote a great post last night, Don’t be a Grin Fucker. His post reminded me of a time when I was out raising money for PhoneTag in 2007. I will not bore you with the details but one of the VC’s I met with, David Weiden from Khosla Ventures, saw some metrics in the business that he did not like.
He could have easily sat there, smiled and sent me on my way. He had already...
“For me ultra running is 90% mental and the other 10% is mental. I have no clue...”
– Ray Zahab, Running the Sahara
This quote just stuck in my head the whole time I was watching this movie. If you have not seen it, Running the Sahara is about 3 people that run 4,300 miles across the Sahara desert in Africa in 111 days, or 38 miles per day.
WatchThis is the trailer for the latest movie my wife has worked on, Ramona and Beezus. After watching the trailer I am pretty sure that this is going to be a big hit. It always makes me really proud to see what she has been able to accomplish in Hollywood.
Is User Experience the next wave?
It seems lately that a lot of the most popular services and products are selling based on the best experience and less on the technology behind them. Look at things likeApple’s iPhone, while yes there is a lot of technology behind the phone the real killer app of the phone is its incredible graceful user experience. I just wrote up a pieceabout how a new spin on UI might be the next...
Palm: this is your survival guide →
I am currently at the CTIA show in Vegas. One of the early announcements was that ATT is going to start selling Palm phones. However while this is a big announcement for Palm, they already have over half the market covered with Verizon/Sprint and still have not been able to get the phones out there. I wish them the best but competing with a $99 iPhone on ATT is going to be pretty difficult.
...
California's new $40 VIP DMV line
I ordered a set of custom licence plates a few months ago. Well it turns out in order to pick custom licence plates up you have to go to your local DMV and wait in line. California has a great online system for booking appointments, but the first one that I could get was about a month away, and with my travel schedule who knows if I would even be here when the day came up.
So I went to the DMV...
My 10 rules of travel
For the last 10 years I have traveled over 100,000 miles per year, click here to see where I have been. Based on trial and error I have come up with a set of 10 rules (in no particular order) to keep up this schedule with killing myself or ruining my family life in the process:
1. Food- Do not eat on the plane. Even if the flight is 15 hours, I do not eat. You digestive system does not work...
Can profitability suck?
Startup entrepreneur Ben Horowitz recently wrote a post The Case for the Fat Startup. He summarizes the article with:
As you listen to the virtues of the lean start-up–lightweight sales, light engineering, and so on–keep the following in mind:
If you are a high-tech start-up, your value is in your intellectual property. Don’t stare at your spreadsheets so long that you get confused about...
Tumblr + Bug Labs + Twilio = Ideal Phone System
Fred Wilson wrote a post a few days ago , “My Ideal Phone System” about his desire for a hosted VOIP system for his new apartment. As a person who has been in and around VOIP and telephony my entire business life it shook me a bit.
What rattled me is that Fred was looking for something that just does not exist today. He wants the simplicity of Skype with the functionality of a more...
“The interesting thing about Steve Jobs’ $5.5 Billion (making him the 136th...”
– Steve Jobs’ employment is a bargain for Apple | 9 to 5 Mac
How crazy is it that Steve Jobs has made less then a 1/4 of his net worth through Apple. I think what this really shows is that Steve is driven by much more then money, he just wants to take over the world, regardless of his percentage of...
Is Push still relevant?
My first blackberry was a cosmic shift in my mobile experience. Going from wireless email that polled vs. one that pushed was life changing. The difference is that polling is set for a increment, say 15 minutes, while push sends email in real time as it is received.
When I switched to the iPhone I set it up for push email using the Microsoft Exchange back end. The problem was that setting up...
“About 10 years ago I was having my annual holiday party, and my niece had come...”
– Jay Goltz
My friend Roger sent this great article to me. I find that people don’t really change, so surrounding yourself with the best people sometimes involves staying away from the non-best ones.
I think it was Predictably Irrational that had a chapter about people who are unlucky vs....
“if I was going to build something beyond a few hundred thousand dollars in...”
– Ryan Allis founder of iContact on Mixergy
Ryan has done an incredible job with iContact, building it to over $30 million in annual sales. I was listening to the interview he did on Mixergy and this quote just sort of popped out at me. I see too often people spending a big portion of their lives...
“Comfortably situated in Chicago outside of the “start-up” echo chamber,...”
– Tim Ferriss
Well said Tim. There are two things that people confuse for business success, press and VC cash, both are good but neither guarantee a successful business. I think for this reason we will start to see a better spread of successful startups outside of Silicon Valley over the next few...
“What’s the right approach to new products? Pick three key attributes or...”
– Paul Buchheit: If your product is Great, it doesn’t need to be Good
I hate watching great services become good services as they water themselves down with extraneous features. People will always ask for more crap and options but they do not always know what is best for them.
(via hiten)
Karma
I recently had someone contact me for advice based on a post I did on buying domain names on Tim Ferriss‘ Four Hour Work Week blog.
Their question involved a .com domain name that they had purchased a few years ago. It turns out that before they got the domain someone had filed for a trademark for the same name and has since been issued the mark, they have the .net.
The person with the...
iSearch
I was thinking today about the competition going on between Apple/Google/Microsoft. The fight is taking place on the mobile phone, PC, cloud and elsewhere.
With Apple’s incredible market share of devices that people access the internet from I think it is only a matter of time before Apple launches their own search. While search is a difficult problem to solve I do believe that with where...
Entrepreneurs to the rescue
One of my favorite blogs, AZSpot, had a post about how Arizona has voted to lease state parks to private businesses. Government budgets are under extreme pressures and as a result a lot of public parks are being closed down to save money.
The picture above is of a long abandoned motel just outside of Los Angeles across the street from the ocean. The site is incredible but on national park...
Must be Morse Code
I am really bad at looking at the details on bills but for some reason I looked through the details of the bill for my Verizon Mifi. What struck me as odd on the bill was that I had received 3 text messages on the devices and was charged $0.60 for it.
When I called customer support, the very nice (really she was nice) agent explained to me that if I wanted she could turn off text messaging. I...
“By most accounts Mint.com’s rapid rise to prominence and ultimate acquisition is...”
– Tod Sacerdoti CEO BrightRoll in TechCrunch
To me it is not making sure you do not “pull a patzer” it is that you make sure that you stay away from some bloated out of date VC that can no longer live in the real world. Why let their out of date and mathematically incorrect business...